This is the cheapest 875P motherboard in this group, but it'll still cost you £111 plus VAT, which is quite a bit more expensive than the 865PE contenders. Unless you happen to need ECC memory support, it is very hard to see the benefit of paying the premium, as its performance is nearly identical to that of the Albatron.

That's a shame, as the 4PCA3+ is a well-specified motherboard that manages to look very neat and tidy despite all the components that Epox has had to find a home for. Some of that space is thanks to the passive heatsink on the Northbridge chip and no heatsink at all on the Southbridge.

Outboard of the four memory slots are the two native IDE controllers, and further down the board are four IDE controllers in a block, controlled by a Highpoint RAID chip. The RAID chip is about the same size as the Southbridge, yet Epox has found space for a diagnostic LED that reports POST (Power On Self Test) error codes if the PC won't start up. In amongst that lot are the two Serial ATA connectors that are controlled by the ICH5R Southbridge. Right at the foot of the board is the floppy controller, as that's the only place left for it.

The two ATX power connectors have plenty of space for easy connection, and one of the few areas of concern is the selection of Broadcom Gigabit LAN as it suffers the same theoretical lower connection speed as the 3Com solution used by ECS.

Epox supplies three brackets to add two USB ports, a gameport and optical SPDIF input and output. In the package you also get a couple of rounded IDE cables plus two Serial ATA cables, and a couple of power adapters for Serial ATA hard drives.

This is a thoughtful package with some interesting features that offers good value and decent performance too.